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Painting Indonesia, In Words

An artistic young man with a fast-changing country—and chickens—for a muse. A review of Michael Vatikiotis's "The Painter of Lost Souls."

By

Sophie Jin

March 14, 2013 12:54 p.m. ET

Michael Vatikiotis' coming-of-age novel "The Painter of Lost Souls" begins as a rural idyll. We meet Sito, a sensitive young painter, in the bamboo stands of his impoverished Javanese village. Our hero likes to imagine the setting as the jungle of the Hindu Mahabharata epic, teeming with demons to slay.

Sito's education begins when his uncle Tono fills him in on the real-life bloodbath that occurred in Indonesia's forests—the country's executions of suspected communists in the 1960s. "It was as if the earth...